The Fifth Sacred Thing

by Starhawk

  Madrone found a peeler in the drawer below the cutting board and went to work over the sink.

  “You, girl—you seen anything?” one of the men asked her. She looked up, widened her eyes, and shook her head no. The less she spoke and revealed the accent of the North, the better, she thought. They continued to search through the kitchen and adjoining rooms, stomping and shouting to one another. Madrone kept her eyes glued to the cucumber, which emerged white and gleaming from under its green peel. How long had it been since she’d eaten fresh vegetables like these? Diosa, at home I used to go into the garden and pick them. She remembered Johanna standing in the kitchen of their country place, chopping vegetables for stew. She remembered Maya in the City kitchen, making soup, and the bushels of tomatoes they would blend for salsa, and the zucchinis, so overabundant that people groaned at the sight of them. Goddess, they had been so rich!

  The cucumbers were peeled, and she began slicing them. Were they watching her? Were their sharp eyes boring beneath her scarf to discover her wet hair? Why, oh why had she succumbed to temptation and taken that swim? She would never survive like this. She would never get back home.

  A door in the opposite wall opened, and suddenly the men became quiet.

  “What is all this?” said a woman’s voice. It was a young voice, but it rang with a tone of authority and an inbred assurance.

  Madrone peeked up quickly. The woman was tall, slender, with blond hair that swept up and back from her head in wings, defying gravity. She wore a white dress, modestly cut but of such fine material that as it shifted and billowed around her it revealed every dimension of her sculpted figure. Her skin was calla-lily white and her blue eyes delicately outlined with color. Madrone wanted to stare at her, but she forced her eyes back down, sneaking little glances with her head bent. She was like something crafted, each movement, each tone in her voice, the precise shading of her cheekbones and the carefully drawn outline of her lips, calculated to suggest seduction. Madrone had never seen anyone quite like her. Some of Holybear’s Fairy friends, maybe, who might spend days dressing up for a ritual, putting henna in their hair and drawing spirals around their eyes. But the effect was quite different.

  Maybe it was the nearness of death, these soldiers behind her with their nervous weapons, searching. Suddenly all the cravings of her body were awake and clamoring. She wanted life. She wanted the sweet caressing water and the cool, wet center of the cucumber and she wanted the woman who stood in the doorway and flicked her eyes over Madrone, registering surprise so subtly that Madrone saw no change in her features, only a tremor in her aura.

  “Security, ma’am,” one of the men said. “Command post up the hill spotted suspicious activity around your pool. Water thieves, probably.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “There seems to be some evidence of disturbance, ma’am. The guard in our command post up the hill saw somebody actually in the pool.”

  Command post up the hill, Madrone thought. A good piece of information to know.

  “In it? Bodily?”

  “That’s right, ma’am.”

  “Mary Ellen, have the gardener drain it and disinfect it.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Pardon me, ma’am, but what we’re trying to say is, this looks like more than just water theft. Could be Witchcraft.”

  “Oh, be serious. There’re no Witches around here.”

  “What else could it be, ma’am? These hillboys don’t swim. They’re afraid of the water.”

  “But why would a Witch go in our pool?”

  Madrone, slicing tomatoes with the knife, wondered seriously if she should plunge it into her own heart. What chance did she have of walking out of here alive and free? How much pain could she withstand if they took her? She wasn’t like Hijohn; she didn’t have his stolid endurance. Or like Bird. And she knew so many routes and plans and faces.

  “It’s a way of cursing, ma’am. They leave their Devil spirits in the water, and when you go in, they get you. Anyway, we’d like to check the house.”

  There would be blood all over these clean white walls, and it would be a hell of a way to repay the woman who had sheltered her. No, to kill herself would be a betrayal. And she didn’t want to die. She wanted the sweet taste of juice on her tongue, she wanted to run her fingers over the contours of the body under the floating dress and feel limbs shudder under hers and feel a heart rise to embrace her loneliness.

  “I can’t believe anyone got into the house.”

  “You never know, ma’am. Anyway, where else could the Witch have gone? We had the yard surrounded.”

  Did Littlejohn get away? And Begood? Had she killed them with her indulgence? Diosa, what had gotten into her? She must have been possessed, for real.

  “Well, check the house, by all means. I’ll be in the atrium. But hurry, please. I’ve got half a dozen women coming for lunch in an hour.”

  Madrone heard the door close. After a moment, the guards left the kitchen.

  “If you’re done with those vegetables, you can start on the potatoes,” Mary Ellen said, gesturing to a basket that stood beside the sink. “Don’t talk until they’re out of the house.” Madrone obeyed, scrubbing and peeling, while from the rooms beyond they heard muffled sounds of searching.

  After a long time, the outer door slammed closed. Madrone could feel tension drain from the kitchen. Mary Ellen let out a long soft sigh, which again reminded Madrone of her grandmother. Johanna’s skin had been just that shade of dark, dark brown, and her hair had also had the texture of silver wire.

  “Thank you,” Madrone said. “You saved my life.”

  Mary Ellen snorted, but before she could reply the blond woman walked back in. She moved with the assurance of ownership, sitting herself down on a kitchen stool.

  “Pour me a drink,” she said to Mary Ellen, who moved to a cupboard with a slight disapproving glance and poured out a dark liquor into a small shot glass. “Pour yourself a drink.”

  “No, thank you, Miss Sara.”

  “And you?”

  “Just water, thanks,” Madrone said.

  Mary Ellen directed her with a glance to a second kitchen stool and brought her a glass and a small bottle of spring water from the refrigerator. She settled herself with the same.

  “Well,” Sara said, “who the hell are you?”

  Madrone was distracted by the water on her tongue, which she drank slowly, blessing her good fortune. Whatever might be about to happen seemed less important than the undeniable truth that for this moment, at least, she was no longer thirsty.

  “Well?”

  Madrone looked up and met her eyes, blue, like the pool. “I guess I’m your resident Witch.”

  “What were you doing in my swimming pool?”

  Madrone was still staring at the blond woman’s face. Clearly, she was used to being stared at, admired. Her face was calm under Madrone’s gaze, patient like a cat receiving homage.

  “I was overcome by temptation, by the chance to get clean. I’m sorry. It was a stupid thing to do.”

  “That it was,” Mary Ellen agreed.

  Sara shot her a quick glance of disapproval and resumed her questions.

  “You’re with the hillboys, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, you’re not what I would have expected. I didn’t think they cared about being clean.”

  “When you don’t have water, after a while you stop caring.”

  “But you didn’t stop.”

  “Unfortunately, no.”

  “But where did you learn to swim?”

  “Where I come from, it’s a normal thing to do.”

  “And where is that?”

  “The North,” Madrone said. They waited, Mary Ellen letting out another soft sigh. They wanted her story, and maybe she owed it to them in exchange for her life. “I came down here to help the Web; they’d asked us for someone. Because I’m a healer.”

  A spark jumped between the other two women.

/>   “What kind of healer?” Sara asked.

  Madrone felt herself stiffen at the woman’s tone. If I were a cat, she thought, the hairs on my back would be bristling. She wasn’t used to be talked to like a servant, and maybe it was time to assert some dignity.

  “Back home, I did primarily midwifery and gynecology. Here, given what there is to work with, what I do is what you might call laying on of hands. We’ve done away with the old hierarchies in the North, but I was educated at the university through what they used to call an M.D. Plus training in herbs and Chinese medicine. Do you have a problem I can help you with?”

  Sara looked at her, perplexed. “I didn’t know they still let women be doctors in the North. And I didn’t realize they let your people into universities.”

  “What people?” Madrone asked, confused.

  “You know, colored people,” Sara said, looking for the first time as if she were not in control. “You are black, aren’t you?”

  “Some of my ancestors came from Africa, if that’s what you mean. Some came from Ireland, Spain, Scotland, France, and the tribes that inhabited the Central American coastal rain forests. What does that make me?”

  “Touched with the tarbrush,” Mary Ellen said, but softly.

  “If they kept all people of African ancestry out of the universities, they’d be pretty empty,” Madrone said, “since the entire human race originated there.”

  “Many would rather forget that fact,” Mary Ellen said.

  “My mother was a doctor,” Madrone went on. “My grandmother was a psychologist, and her mother was a registered nurse, so I guess you could say that being a healer runs in our family.”

  Sara stared at her, trying to take in something she couldn’t quite comprehend, and then suddenly she smiled, not the seductive arc with which she had favored them earlier but a broad tomboy grin that made her whole face come alive.

  “Well, I can’t match that,” she said. “In my case, my mother was a whore.”

  Madrone looked at her, shocked in turn.

  “A high-class whore, of course,” Sara said. “She married her best client. So I guess I too follow the family profession.”

  “Don’t be giving bad names to yourself,” Mary Ellen said. She turned to Madrone. “And don’t be all day staring at that cucumber. If you want it so bad, eat it.”

  She tossed some vegetables into a bowl and set it in front of Madrone. Madrone placed a slice of cucumber in her mouth. She almost wished the other two women would go away, so she could simply savor its coolness on her tongue. She could hardly concentrate on what they were saying.

  Mary Ellen was placing vegetables in a bowl, making a salad. Madrone ate with Sara’s eyes fixed on her, slightly uncomfortable under that gaze.

  “Maybe she can help the child,” Sara said.

  “Your ladies be here in half an hour.”

  “Yes. I’m thinking of that.”

  “And Mr. Hall, what if he be coming home?”

  “He’s gone for the week again, thank Jesus. What is your name?” she asked Madrone.

  Madrone resisted the temptation to stuff all the remaining vegetables in her mouth at once. She debated making up a name for them, but it seemed unnecessary. Her own name was in nobody’s files. “Madrone. If I can help you, I will.”

  “I’ll finish the lunch,” Mary Ellen said. “You take her.”

  At the bottom of the house, dug into the hillside, were two dimly lit rooms, servants’ quarters. By the standards of the hills, of course, they were luxurious, with real beds and blankets and chests for clothes. On one bed lay a small child, a girl who looked about five years old, and Madrone could see by the wavering, dull light that played over her skin that she was very ill. There was a grayish tone to her nut-brown skin, and a bluish cast to her lips.

  “Her name is Angela,” Sara said. “She’s my niece. Can you help her?”

  “I don’t know.” Madrone knelt beside the child and laid a hand over her chest. Slowing her breath, she let herself feel the patterns of the girl’s energy. Yes, what she had suspected from her first glance at her aura was true.

  “She has blood cancer,” Madrone said. “Leukemia.”

  “Yes, that’s what we’ve suspected.”

  “But there are drugs for that. Gene therapy and antivirals and white-cell boosters. Any regular doctor can treat her.”

  “But no doctor will treat her. Officially she’s Mary Ellen’s child.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “My sister, who was never very wise, had a little dalliance with Mary Ellen’s son. They were discreet but not careful, and she got pregnant. Oh, we tried to get her an abortion but it was too dangerous—the Millennialists were on a campaign and nobody would do it. So we sent her off to our country house, and when the child came, Mary Ellen passed it off as hers. They might have gotten away with it if they’d had sense enough to break off the affair, but they didn’t. And so eventually, of course, one of the other servants denounced them. Charles ran off to the hills, and Lisa—well, we no longer speak of her.”

  That’s an odd turn of phrase, Madrone thought, but she said simply, “I’m sorry.”

  “I loved my sister, headstrong little idiot that she was. I’d like to save her child.”

  “I could tell you what drugs to get, and how to administer them.”

  “It’s too dangerous. Don’t you see—we can’t afford to call any attention to her existence. What if my husband found out? Mary Ellen could go to the pens for having an illegitimate child. They don’t usually enforce it with the blacks, but if we rub their noses in it, trying to doctor her, they’d have to.”

  “Your husband doesn’t know?”

  “My husband is an odious man. I never tell him anything.” The words were spoken without emotion, but Madrone heard the whiplash of pain behind them. She didn’t know what to say.

  “I suppose this all looks pretty good to you,” Sara said. “This house, the money, the water—”

  “No, it doesn’t look good to me.” Madrone turned and faced her. The blue eyes were cold, but like something flash-frozen in the first cold of winter, something pleading, aching to melt. “To me it looks like a form of hell.”

  Sara flashed her wry grin. “You know an alternative?”

  “Yes,” Madrone said seriously. “As a matter of fact, I do.” The child moaned and opened her eyes. Madrone read pain in them, and Sara stooped and laid a hand on the girl’s forehead.

  “Angela, this nice lady is here to help you. She knows a lot of special magic, but it only will work if you keep it a secret. Never, never tell anybody about her. Promise?”

  The girl nodded. Her eyes were huge and round and dark, and suddenly Madrone couldn’t stand the look in them. She wasn’t ready to take on a healing of this magnitude; she needed food and rest. How long had it been since she’d slept? But she couldn’t ignore the child’s pain. Closing her own eyes and calling in her power, she soothed the inflammation and poured vitality through the girl’s bloodstream, released pressure on swollen joints, and rewove the patterns of her ch’i. Her own energy was running low and she still hadn’t tackled the cause of the disease, but she knew suddenly that she didn’t have the strength to go deeper. Reluctantly, she withdrew. The child would have a remission, at least, and maybe Madrone could come back later and finish, when she was fed and rested, if she ever again were fed and rested. She had been here too long already, and yet she didn’t see how she could leave unobserved before dark. Suddenly Madrone was so tired that all she could do was slump down against the wall and close her own eyes. Just for a moment.

  She awoke to find Sara still standing above her, looking down, her face unreadable.

  “The child looks better,” she said.

  “She’s improved but not cured,” Madrone said. “I don’t know—I might be able to cure her, but I can’t do it today. I just don’t have the strength.”

  “I can see that.” Sara smiled again, the urchin grin that cut through th
e polished surface. “You need more than ten minutes of sleep.”

  “A lot more.”

  “We don’t expect miracles from you.”

  Why not? Madrone thought. Everybody else does. And I produce them just often enough to keep them hoping.

  “I’m not talking about miracles,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m talking about just a little more juice than I’ve got today. Or a few lousy credits’ worth of drugs.” It was back, suddenly, her rage, burning away her tiredness, making her feel invincible. Maybe she should tackle the child again now—but she had learned to distrust this state, knowing how the energy could suddenly drain away, leaving her spent. And she still had miles of trail to cover tonight, and the security forces to dodge. And she desperately needed to eat some more. “I don’t know, maybe I can come back another time. Or maybe next time we raid a pharmacy I can bring you some pills for her.”

  “It’s ironic,” Sara said. “My husband manages a drug company. They send truckloads out to the labor camps. If I could think of a plausible story—but no. It’s just too dangerous. Anyway, how can I thank you?”

  “You already saved my life once today. If I could eat something and drink something, you’d save it again.”

  “Would you care to join me and the other ladies for lunch? Perhaps you could talk to us about where you come from.”

  “Are you out of your mind?”

  “No. You can trust us. These friends—they’re more than friends, really. We’re a group—well, you’ll see. The hillboys aren’t the only ones trying to make changes.”

  “I’ve got to get out of here somehow,” Madrone said.

  “Stay here until after dark. Then I’ll drive you somewhere if you want.”

  Madrone feared that she was trusting Sara only because she was too tired to think for herself. But I am too tired to think for myself, she admitted, so why not go along with her? I could learn something.

  “Okay,” she said. With a great effort, she pulled herself up and once more leaned down to touch the forehead of the sleeping child. “She should be all right for a while, now. Let her rest.”